One of the most exciting things about art is the unexpected synergies and conversations that emerge when various works are placed next to each other, often at random. Whether in the gallery or on a stage, suddenly links are established and connections are made visible.

On Monday night at the Wortham Center, the audience witnessed just such an auspicious pairing. As Francisco Goldman and then Nicole Krauss took to the stage, the intimate details from each of their novels created a shared discussion about love, grief, longing, death and hope. Rich Levy began the evening by saying that Goldman’s novel (Say Her Name), though it plumbs the depths of loss, actually emerges as a kind of celebration. Before reading from a surprisingly funny chapter of his novel, Goldman enjoined the audience to giggle whenever they found something humorous; he gave everyone permission to experience a complex range of emotions and not simply a somber melancholy. The chapter featured robotic rats in subway stations and litter twirling the night air like frozen bats, as he recounted several instances prior to the death of his wife Aura Estrada in which he experienced small moments of loss. These were often seemingly trivial stories, typical mix-ups like a forgotten phone call provoking worry or misunderstood directions resulting in both of them standing alone on different subway platforms with a few stops between them. These moments of temporary separation became tiny, absurd rehearsals of the larger absence haunting the narrative. As Goldman joked, “Death doesn’t let you stop for hot chocolate.” There was a sense of fun in the prose, but also a very palpable sense of ruin, of writing from the ruins of the day that was supposed to have been–“the ruins of the future,” as Goldman called them.

Both authors mentioned Bruno Schultz’s book The Street of Crocodiles as a text they kept close by during their writing process and a book that Aura Estrada also valued deeply. Nicole Krauss mentioned it as she began her reading as a way of pulling out a thread that united her work with Goldman’s. Unexpectedly, Krauss’s reading also meditated strongly on the aftermath left behind by death. In the section she read from Great House, she used the first-person voice of a father to think about his relationship with his own son after his wife and the son’s mother had passed.

Themes of death and longing and hope reemerged during the discussion section thoughtfully moderated by University of Houston Honors College professor and novelist, Robert Cremins. Cremins pointed out that all the characters in the book seem to be in a moment of crisis, brutally struggling within themselves. These crises motivate the characters of both novelists as they attempt to grapple with intensely fraught situations. Krauss talked about how, for her, empathy is the only reason to write, the opportunity to crawl inside the psyche of another person. She also spoke about the inheritances that come down to us and “reverberate through the generations.” Goldman spoke about his investigations into what Marcel Proust has referred to as “the mysteries of personality” (thanks to Lydia Davis’s recent translations). At the end, Goldman returned to the Kabbalah and the Jewish mystical tradition as he talked about his mission as a writer as “getting the spark of life into the mud.”

In their writing, it seems that both Krauss and Goldman are working towards a similar mystical goal.

Time spirals around continually in Francisco Goldman’s novel Say Her Name. Aura dies on the first page and then she is alive and then she is gone and always time is defined by where we are in relation to the date of her passing: July 25, 2007. This narrative structure gives a sense of motion and movement and instability, all of which allow the reader to breathe a bit. I was asking myself repeatedly: is this scene before Aura’s death? Or after? At the end we are suddenly in the moment on the beach in Mazunte, that fateful moment when a wave hit Aura at just the wrong angle and took her life.

As I read the book, I wondered how a person can focus in on this kind of awful, random horror for so long and with the diligent intensity that writing a novel demands. Slowly I began to see why Goldman kept on writing this book and why he labored to pull it out of his deepest depths. I also understood what an intense experience reading the book is. It becomes a communion of reader and writer and character. We all participate in bringing Aura into the world of the living again and allowing her to think and write and breathe once more.

It is crucial to remember though that this book is still a novel, not a memoir. There are parts that are highly fictionalized and even fanciful. Perhaps unexpectedly, there’s also a good deal of humor in the book, both Aura’s humor and Frank’s. I’m glad Goldman decided to write a novel and not a more traditional memoir, because the imagined elements of the novel move it to another level, to a place where pain and horror are transcended by humor, joy and even happiness.

It’s been a bit challenging for me to write these blog posts. Writing through this mixture of the personal and the literary means dealing with a number of conflicting emotions and thinking about deeply difficult topics. But then when I turn to the novel and think about the intense challenge its writing must have entailed, I’m left with even more respect (and awe) for Goldman as a writer. And Frank as a person.

When I first purchased Say Her Name some months back it was with a mix of anticipation and fear. I was happy to have another one of Francisco Goldman’s novels, excited to be sucked into his always entrancing prose. I knew the narrative would pull me in and not let me go, but, this time around, I wasn’t sure if I was ready.

The difficult thing is that Say Her Name is the story of how Goldman lost his wife Aura Estrada and his horrific personal journey away from the brink of real madness and through the process of writing about her life and their relationship. But unlike my experience of other books that deal with grief in this personal, physical way, I knew the main actors in the drama. This meant that reading this act of remembrance was also a trip through my own memories of this amazing person, Aura. While I only spent time with her on a few occasions, those times were incredibly intense and, in the case of their wedding in San Miguel de Allende, overwhelmingly joyful.

Goldman has talked about writing this novel as a way of bringing Aura back to life, resuscitating her and living with her again through the writing process. Aura does come back to life in the book, she becomes the same witty, smart, hilarious, vibrant person that she was in daily life. And this is both a rush of joy and a bittersweet encounter.

Please make time to come see Francisco Goldman on September 19, 2011 at the Wortham Center downtown.

Francisco Goldman was the first writer I realized was a human being. In the real world. Off the page. It’s odd it took so many years for me to recognize this very obvious fact. I was living in Tampico, Mexico, in 2004 and reading his latest book (at the time), The Divine Husband. The novel revolves around a brief period that the original pan-Americanist literary and political powerhouse, José Martí, spent in Guatemala. Goldman’s novel invents the story of a young woman, María de las Nieves Morán, with whom he’s said to have fallen in love, but the novel also delves into the stories of a panoply of characters around her, as she travels back and forth to New York and around other parts of the Americas. I’d read (and loved) all of Goldman’s previous novels before that: The Long Night of White Chickens and The Ordinary Seaman.

I spent two long days on the couch in our hot, sticky living room, enthralled by the novel. I slowly became more and more obsessive about the man who wrote these books, snooping around on-line and searching for any information about Goldman or Martí. I even got a copy of the complete works of José Martí in Spanish to deepen my quest. But suddenly, one day as I was cyber-stalking Goldman, I found out he’d be in Austin that following weekend. I talked it out with friends and decided in the end to take the risk. I got on a bus from Tampico and rode the sixteen hours or so north, all the while furiously writing out questions for the “author.” I went to Goldman’s event and sat near the back, finally building up the nerve to ask one overly thought-out, frighteningly complex question. Afterwards, I struck up a conversation with the man himself and, surprise surprise, he was a human being. And a friendly one at that.

Long story short, Francisco Goldman became Frank. He was smart (I already knew that), but he was also a raucously good time: funny, kind and incredibly open and welcoming. That weekend, I also met and fell for Aura, his girlfriend then, and a slew of his literary and not-so-literary friends. I did an awkward interview with Frank in a hotel lobby based on all the questions I’d pulled together on the bus. Rather than being scared (probably the more rational response), he was flattered and charmed. We ended up hanging out all weekend, drinking well into the morning, partying like literary rock stars, even swimming in a sparkling pool well after the bars had closed. On the bus back to the dusty, industrial neighborhood where I was living in Tampico, I was literally bouncing with joy. Who knew the people with their names on books were actual people?

Recently, Inprint asked me to blog about Frank’s most recent book, Say Her Name, and specifically about its mix of memoir and fiction. So each week for the next three weeks, I’ll be putting a new blog post up here. As I thought about what I would write, I realized that my experience of Francisco Goldman, the author, is impossible for me to separate from my experience of Frank, the friend. So these posts will also be a mixture of memoir and book review. And of course promotion for his upcoming event in Houston on September 19 at the Wortham Center downtown. Don’t miss it! Get your tickets now!